Thom Holwerda has written a reply to Eugenia’s editorial yesterday: “Yesterday, Eugenia, editor-in-chief of OSNews.com, published an editorial that angered the open-source software community. Even though I believe Eugenia can manage on her own just fine, I do want to support the editorial, with the use of some elaborations and clarifications.”
Commercial software
By Everyone who thinks they ar (IP: —.union01.nj.comcast.net) – Posted on 2005-03-12 15:04:26
Commercial software works entirely different from volunteer based software. I’VE ACTUALLY WRITTEN SOFTWARE FOR ONE THING.
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One of the critical points though is to put together a “value list” of features where each feature is weighed by its cost in time to develop and how badly the customers want it.
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Incidently, since the people who want this GNOME feature really bad apparently do not know how to code (or there wouldn’t really be a problem,) how on Earth do you intend to maintain it? How will you add in new features or bugfixes as the GNOME source code advances?
Bullcrap. There are people who do code who know enough to submit patches that are ignored but they simply do not have the time to support a full fork like the Nautilus deriative fork that is floating out there.
Havoc himself admits that projects ignore a lot of patches because merging in patches is no fun. But a good bit of the work done on gnome IS commercial software work when Sun, Red Hat, and others bankroll part of the development on a desktop that is wonderful in many ways but missing a handful of seriously basic functions like editing the menu or searching the file system from the file manager.
Hope Jesse doesn’t mind me reposting this from the other thread, but it defines the attitude of Eugenia very clearly. We aren’t talking about some kind hearted saint who was rejected communion here.
“Ironic stance given Eugenia’s statements about OSNEWS
By Jesse S.A. Bridgewater (IP: —.ee.ucla.edu) – Posted on 2005-03-11 18:10:57
On Eugenia’s editor page , http://osnews.com/editor.php?editors_id=1 , she says the following:
I do OSNews for pure fun (it is just a hobby for me in order to fill up my free time), so if you have a problem with my spelling and grammar either:
a) do not come back (spare us and save your time too) b) send me a proofread version of the article in question.
Whining about something I can’t radically improve overnight, is not an option.
She donates her time and is not that interested in hearing whining about what she produces in that donated time. This sounds alot like how FOSS developers feel about their code.
Jesse”
Touche.
So the limit of your effort for your proposed change is to contact the developers and if that doesn’t work, post on their blog and complain?
LOOK AT TRANSGAMING.
Re: By Johnathan Bailes (IP: —.chvlva.adelphia.net) – Posted on 2005-03-12 15:
By d (IP: —.union01.nj.comcast.net) – Posted on 2005-03-12 18:41:29
So the limit of your effort for your proposed change is to contact the developers and if that doesn’t work, post on their blog and complain?
Who is posting on a developer’s blog?
It would really be cool to have the time to learn gtk2+ and write some patches. But why in the hell bother when guys on the top of the food chain on the developer’s list tell you they don’t have the time for patches and regularily ignore them because they are pain.
What do you contribute? I hear this all the time. Most people do not even bother looking at bugzilla. I post my bugs and feature requests and try to be a good user.
Then I look at the developer lists too long and become frustrated. I see them ignore or turn down patches out of hand. Why bother trying to patch any of the stuff in gnome-love (go to footnotes its a list of needed patches and things the gnome devs need from the community) if its just going to get ignored and the developers themselves have the gall to admit it freely like its some damn inside joke.
Transgaming??? I mentioned nothing about the state of gaming in linux. Though I was going to buy Majesty Gold soon. I like that game.
Holy Out of context replying batman!
reread what I wrote earlier.
Transgaming is the result of WINE changing licenses and leaning towards application support first, games second. Codeweavers’ is another attempt at going the support MS Office 1st route.
They forked wine when it changed licenses, found new developers, created a business to sustain their developers and have made great products. THEY WILL MODIFY THEIR SOFTWARE TO SUPPORT USER DESIRES because they are paid to. They have a patch request area. They have a voting scheme to determine what gets fixed / supported next. THEY USE IT.
IBM and RedHat sell support and make a pretty good living on it and for customization. Mandrake was Red Hat. It was forked and a company was formed to keep the project going and to pay developers. The result is feely-downloadable software.
It boggles the mind what people have posted here. THINK for 2 seconds. Personally, I would LOVE a new GUI installer for Debian, but I’m not a huge fan of Progeny. I don’t berate the developers of Debian for not having a GUI installer–They don’t OWE it to me to make their software easy to use.
“I don’t berate the developers of Debian for not having a GUI installer–They don’t OWE it to me to make their software easy to use.”
Sheesh. Talk about beeing out of context.. Where does debian claim to be the pinnacle of usability? Where do they claim to be the easiest and best choice for beginners?
The point here is that we are constantly washed over with propaganda that tells us how great gnome is, it’s “usability”, “HIG”, “productivity” and what not. Then, when finally it’s showtime, someone tries to give some input into the project we are frankly told that in the end users opinions doesn’t matter one bit, in fact sometimes the project seems to get out of it’s way to make things hard on you.
Don’t promise things in your marketing you can’t or won’t live up to. If you don’t want other people to use your software, and you aren’t prepaired to accept input on it, keep it in your closet, and don’t put it in such a high profile project as gnome, which has a hughe number of users, with a large number of them depending on it.
She donates her time and is not that interested in hearing whining about what she produces in that donated time. This sounds alot like how FOSS developers feel about their code.
I think this is a valid point, in that just because Eugenia and other people who spend their time working on articles for OSNews without compensation doesn’t absolve them of all responsibility do to a good job. If they write an article that’s full of grammar and punctuation mistakes, fails to make a valid point, or is plaigarized, they deserve to be criticised for those shortcomings, whether they’re volunteers or not.
But Eugenia’s not saying that you have no right to say that her English isn’t perfect. She knows that. She’s not prideful about it at all. But I believe that she’s right to say that it’s pointless to gripe about her English ability because unless you’re willing to take the time to send her specific edits, so she can learn from her mistakes, it’s not going to be much help. Most of the people who have jabbed at her for her grammar aren’t doing it because they genuinely want to improve the grammar at OSNews. They do it to try to undermine her credibility.
Eugenia is not criticising the Gnome developers because of Gnome’s shortcomings. On the contrary, she has put dozens if not hundreds of hours into working to provide specific feedback in order to try to make Gnome better, because she really wants the project to succeed. And she feels like the Gnome developers are treating her like she’s some asshole who comments on OSNews, “learn how to spell, idiot.”
So your criticism is thought-provoking, but if you examine the facts of the case, I don’t think Eugenia’s being hypocritical at all. Her comment on her “about us” page” “do not come back (spare us and save your time too” is a little cheeky, and maybe even rude, but she’s talking about a completely different kind of mean-spirited criticism than what she’s directied at the Gnome developers.
I actually do.
First off, I think Eugenia has slightly left behind the notion that in an open source project you have a finite amount of resources, and they’re doing a lot of it in their free time. Even the developers paid to work on projects have other responsibilities to their companies, and can’t really do it full-time. There is that to consider, which it doesn’t look like she’s done. You just cannot get past that – it is a physical reality.
However, you’ve got a lot of OSS developers mouthing off about the many thousands of seats that they have running Gnome etc. etc. and the number of users they have and what they’re going to do to challenge proprietary desktops (blah, blah, blah) and yet they won’t take the rough with the smooth. On that, I think Eugenia does have a pretty legitimate point even though she may come across as ranting. It pays to pause and think about what someone has actually written rather than reaching for the keyboard.
How will this be solved? I haven’t got a clue. I think it will continue to be a problem unfortunately.
It appears that GNOME 2.10 implemented many features and that this project is alive and well. I think that they want to make the DE user friendly yet try not to limit the freedom of power users. I’m trying to figure out where GNOME has gone wrong, and I can’t think of anything.
Eugenia is a flip flop, because she jumps from OS to OS and does not retain objectivity. I don’t trust her because she has not followed a consistant and professional approach other than to haunt these boards.
well the last of my comments perhaps applies to me too, but I’m no damn flip flop.
>>>>I do OSNews for pure fun (it is just a hobby for me in order to fill up my free time), so if you have a problem with my spelling and grammar either:
a) do not come back (spare us and save your time too)
b) send me a proofread version of the article in question.
Whining about something I can’t radically improve overnight, is not an option.<<<<
You’re right… she donates her time, and doesn’t want to be given any crap for her cultural linguistic limitations. But the point here… is that she TELLS YOU THAT from the beginning. It’s a disclaimer. She’s not pretending to be anything else.
GNOME’s official position, in black and white, is to be “user-centric.” As stated earlier… if they want to turn a blind eye to user feedback, they shouldn’t make the claim. And don’t waste your time with the lack of an ‘operational definition’…. USER-Centric in this sense refers to decisions implemented with the user’s needs in mind. If a user is trying to express their need, and no one’s listening…. then you’re not user-centric.
And in the middle of all of those e-mail conversations:
What would be really valuable is to go out there and do some field research. Ask end users, not enthusiasts, what their top-5 annoyances are. Find a list of big deployments of GNOME (City of Largo, various cities in Germany and Spain, Brazilian Telecentros…)
That’s what I mean. When you want to promote this kind of stuff (and let’s face it, go mouthing off about it) you have to take the rough with the smooth. Havoc Pennington claims that the overlap between polls on web sites and Enterprise(tm) users is about 5%. He obviously doesn’t have much experience with Enterprise users, as all they will do if they find something annoying is work around it and/or swear and curse at the screen. There is a heck of a lot more overlap than you think because Enterprise users simply don’t tell you anything.
As an aside, deployments in Germany are definitely not Gnome-based (they’re not even Suse either) and Largo is not a Gnome deployment either. People claiming that this was happening in Largo were doing so because they couldn’t get any significant deployments of Gnome in five years of trying.
A lot of hype and nonsense about an organisation replacing Gnome with KDE when there certainly aren’t many deployments of KDE in the world?! It fills you with confidence, and is really related to the sort of attitude Eugenia was talking about.
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By Anonymous (IP: —.cg.shawcable.net) – Posted on 2005-03-12 21:35:04
It appears that GNOME 2.10 implemented many features and that this project is alive and well. I think that they want to make the DE user friendly yet try not to limit the freedom of power users. I’m trying to figure out where GNOME has gone wrong, and I can’t think of anything.
Actually if they implement everything they say in 2.12 I might say the same thing.
Where did Gnome go wrong? Hmmmmmm…..
All I know is that a lot of people I felt that gnome 2.0 was faster yes I said it than Gnome 1.4 which was light years slower than gnome 1.2. Nautilus was waaaaay faster but still needed improvement and te startup was at least 3 seconds faster than the latest KDE on the same box.
I don’t know exactly what went wrong but slowly every app became more amd more like gnome-terminal feeling slow and leaky. Evolution was always a hog but as the minor numbers progressed Nautilus and the panel took longer to launch. Though I have to say spatial nautilus seems snappier than the browser version.
It looks like a great developer has plugged up two or three major leaks in gnome-terminal and if they can gnome-terminal feel fast and not suck resources I would be happy and its a good clue that optimization is not impossible.
What is coming for gnome 2.12?
1) Menu editing
2) Beagle included
3) better network support — fix the samba browsing problem? Browse network — browse to host — click host and no permissions to view but no prompt at all for username and password?
4) Use gstreamer backend instead of esound — thank god! —
That made me feel a lot better when I read that. If they at least get the samba browsing issues and the menu editing fixed, then I will be happy.
Where did Gnome go wrong? Hmmmmmm…..
This discussion wasn’t just about Gnome actually, and isn’t just related to Gnome software and development efficiency issues.
This is a river a lot of open source projects have to (and are trying to) cross – not just Gnome.
David Adams… does Eugenia get paid to write for this site? I see advertisements all over, I imagine they’re paying something.
Because you both fundamentally misunderstand FLOSS, apparently because you’ve fixated on the “for free” aspect instead of the freedom aspect that it is actually based on, you disgrace yourself by targeting hobbyist developers. That is from the very first paragraph of what Eugenia wrote: “But I am increasingly frustrated with Open Source software written by hobbyists.” The rest of the rant goes on to say how hobbyists need to be lead by users. I suppose you misunderstand this because the OSI has done all it could to water down the FLOSS movement into a “for-free” open source movement. She only calls it open source, underlining her disregard for the freedom it brings.
It is a literal shame that you all seem to support this attitude, because it has absolutely nothing in common with the concepts of freedom nearly all gpl software is based on.
It is very interesting that you all are pretending that she wrote some rational, thought provoking piece… when in actuality all she did was attack the most charitable people, the hobbyists, among us.
If you continue to defend that, then that is certainly a black mark for this site.
And when I say “you all”, I mean the editors/posters of this site.
You know Johnathon, for someone who seems to mainly be concerned about the editability of menus, you sure do seem to have a lot to say. Bullshit, but a lot of it. Its very sad that you aren’t happy with Gnome. Why do you use it? I’ve been tracking Gnome since before the 2.0 days and I can assure you that the level of quality and its general robustness has come a long, long way. In fact, it is now a generally stable, usable and reliable system. Still has a long way to go.
This argument between Eugenia and the devs was never about your precious menu editing — if you mention it one more time I’m sure I’ll scream. Do you think you need to say it again? Are you certain that you are the only one aware of that and without you crying about it at every opportunity no one would understand how devastatingly important it is? Please–its been reported by multiple people in multiple ways at multiple places at multiple times. Everyone knows and there is work being done on that front as we speak. That’s the point — Eugenia was really saying, “hey, me and a bunch of my nerd-pals are pretty peeved about the following items. I’ll make a list and a poll and I’ll submit the top 50. That way you’ll know exactly what you must work on because if its not on the list, it shouldn’t be on your agenda.” You see, its not about a specific feature. Its about Eugenia (and apparently people like yourself) not understanding decorum or process. Does Eugenia have a looking glass where she has some sort of vantadge point that is more privldedged than the people actually working on the problem? Is Eugenia, who is not considered a contributor, somehow more likely to understand the deep issues or have better insights into the process than people who have been struggling with it for years?
Just because Eugenia’s squeek didn’t get oiled does not mean the community is ignoring these usability issues. What it means is that arragance and hostility are not received well (anywhere) and that not all ideas will be accepted — period.
So please, get off your high “user” horse. Everytime you say that Gnome is somehow not “user centric” you come off looking like a spoiled brat, a goon — an idiot really. Save yourself. Be nice. That doesn’t mean you oughtn’t be critical or point out problems. It just means you shouldn’t point fingers and go “woes me” all the time.
You haven’t read the other thread? It was stated explicitly in one of the comments that Eugenia does NOT get paid for her work @OSNEWS. Frankly, your personal attack on Eugenia is simply appalling.
The reason menu editor is disabled on GNOME 2.6->2.10 are it was buggy. Since menu editor is not on developer priority during that time, it is a small problem. Apparently, 2.12 will be based from freedesktop standard.
I remember that I have tested Fedora Core 3 Test 3 with udev that pratically detected all partitions (even FAT32 and NTFS) but it didn’t make on final version because of a nasty bug from RAID. I learned a lesson to not bashing developer decision, afterall, they are human like us.
I kind of like the rate that OSS is developing. It seems quite natural. I’ve been following it since about 2000-ish, may be sooner if you count some horrible experiments with early redhat and “redmond Linux” 😉
Sure, there are many features and bugs I’d like to see taken care of, but on the whole, I love the Open Source community’s ability to solve my software needs. Slowly, but surely. Not to dog on E L-Q or Thom (your site is down – can’t get to your article, mate) but I just want to send a big THANK YOU out to the devs. I dig your work!
-foo
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WTF are you talking about? Are you brain dead? Aside from the ads on the page, OSnews does charge $20 for membership. Read the media kit for Christ sake:
She said she did not own either Osnews or the Gtkapps page is what she said and that total revenue for the pages barely cover the expense in bandwidth anyway.
It would help if you read the threads from the devel list.